Speaker 1: Also media. Hey everybody, Robert Evans here, and you know
Speaker 1: we're still coming down from our end of the year celebration.
Speaker 1: I'm headed off to Cees where we'll be doing reporting
Speaker 1: before it could happen here and better offline, we're going
Speaker 1: to be coming back for the new year soon. The
Speaker 1: Oprah episodes will be in the can. Very excited to
Speaker 1: introduce you all to that, but for this week, we're
Speaker 1: going to be going back to a rerun, so please
Speaker 1: enjoy the story of Rush Limbaugh. Welcome to Behind the Bastards,
Speaker 1: the podcast that I continually failed to introduce like a professional,
Speaker 1: which is particularly shameful this week because our guest is
Speaker 1: a very professional voice artist, mister Paul F. Tom Good.
Speaker 2: Thank you for having me.
Speaker 1: Thank you for being here. Paul, you are the voice
Speaker 1: of a lot of characters that that that a lot
Speaker 1: of people enjoy. Uh. I think most famously to me
Speaker 1: at least, UH is mister peanut Butter also.
Speaker 2: The voice of a lot of characters that people hate.
Speaker 1: That's true. That's true because if you're really achieving as
Speaker 1: an artist, a lot of people are going to hate
Speaker 1: anything that you do.
Speaker 2: That's the that's you're exactly.
Speaker 1: And today we're talking about a truly historical success of
Speaker 1: a creative mind, a man hated by tens of millions
Speaker 1: of people and who should be hated by billions, A
Speaker 1: man who has done, I would say, in calculable harm
Speaker 1: to the future of human life and all life on
Speaker 1: this planet, mister rush Limbaugh.
Speaker 2: Correct.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, Paul, What do you have any kind of
Speaker 1: history with rush Limbaugh, Like in terms of your upbringing
Speaker 1: and stuff. I don't know much about how you grew up. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Do you know what I forgot that I forgot? First
Speaker 2: of all, I forgot how long he's been around. And
Speaker 2: I remember watching him in his earliest days on TV
Speaker 2: and watching that show like as a goof the way,
Speaker 2: I would watch, you know, the Morton Downey Junior Show
Speaker 2: or Wally George or whatever, and just like, who is
Speaker 2: this clown? And he's like doing this this sort of
Speaker 2: you know what seemed like a character, you know at
Speaker 2: the time, because he I think he fancied himself an
Speaker 2: entertainer and had a show that had little skits in
Speaker 2: it and stuff like that, and I I thought he
Speaker 2: was just ridiculous, and so I watched him ironically, and
Speaker 2: and then things just got worse. Like I, I sort
Speaker 2: of got tired of it. I remember getting tired of
Speaker 2: it and like, Okay, this is just like the same
Speaker 2: thing over and over again, and it's not it's not
Speaker 2: pushing that that button in my ironic pleasure center anymore.
Speaker 2: So I just stopped watching. But he, despite despite my
Speaker 2: my jumping ship and you to do what he was doing.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Tomkins demographic, but he kept the my parents and
Speaker 1: everyone that raised me demographics. What was your upbringing particularly political?
Speaker 1: Would you say?
Speaker 2: Not, you know what, not super political. I was raised. Uh.
Speaker 2: My family was a uh lower middle class, uh, big
Speaker 2: Catholic family in Philadelphia, in in a a sort of
Speaker 2: suburb called Mount Airy, and we were both of my
Speaker 2: My family was like lifelong Democrats, you know, Philadelphia Democrats,
Speaker 2: and so that was kind of it, Like we were
Speaker 2: just sort of you know, uh like a conservative liberal family. Uh.
Speaker 2: And yeah, I I we we didn't talk a lot
Speaker 2: about politics in the house growing up, and that was
Speaker 2: kind of it. But I knew that we were. We
Speaker 2: were liberal demo crats, you know, who were weirdly enough,
Speaker 2: guided by guided by I'm not even gonna say faith.
Speaker 2: I think we were guided by my parents' sort of
Speaker 2: morals where they were greatest generation Depression babies, and uh,
Speaker 2: they voted straight Democrat. But they were not like even
Speaker 2: though we were Catholic, it was like we were not
Speaker 2: single issue voters, you know, but they but my family
Speaker 2: was my parents were brought up with the same sort
Speaker 2: of prejudices that people of their generation were brought up with,
Speaker 2: you know. But but yeah, politics did not figure any.
Speaker 2: It was like when I got when I got you know,
Speaker 2: a little older and out of the house and everything,
Speaker 2: that's when I started, you know, investigating my own politics.
Speaker 2: And it was like a long journey.
Speaker 1: You know, that is very exciting to me, just because
Speaker 1: your your you, you came from kind of more of
Speaker 1: a you know, a liberally background, and your introduction to
Speaker 1: Rush Limbaugh was kind of watching it as a character, right. Yes, yeah,
Speaker 1: I grew up very conservative. My parents were also lower
Speaker 1: middle class, verging on poor in when I was like
Speaker 1: kind of little, a lot of economic anxiety, but extremely conservative.
Speaker 1: I would say, like our family religion was conservatism, and
Speaker 1: so Rush Limbaugh was caught. Whenever I was driving with
Speaker 1: my mom or my dad, Rush was on. We listened
Speaker 1: to him. My parents talked about him, so My upbringing
Speaker 1: with him was that this guy is like the profit
Speaker 1: of of what's what's right, you know, both in the
Speaker 1: political sense and in the moral sense. So I'm very
Speaker 1: excited about this, and I'm excited that, you know who
Speaker 1: Morton Downey Junior is, because we're gonna be talking about
Speaker 1: him a bit too. Absolutely, So, yeah, Rush Limbaugh is
Speaker 1: It's hard to over sell this guy's influence on our
Speaker 1: current state of Like, I think it would be fair
Speaker 1: to say we're kind of like verging on civil conflict
Speaker 1: right now between the right and left in the United States,
Speaker 1: for sure. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, so yeah, And I
Speaker 1: think Rush Limbaugh has a huge might be the man
Speaker 1: most responsible for that.
Speaker 2: I totally agree that his influence cannot be Uh is
Speaker 2: it overestimated?
Speaker 1: Like, yeah, he cannot.
Speaker 2: It's like I I the day he died, I tweeted,
Speaker 2: I tweeted, Uh, if I had to say something positive,
Speaker 2: I guess if I had to say something positive, I'm
Speaker 2: glad Rush Limbaugh lived long enough to get cancer and die.
Speaker 2: And then that got that got picked up by foxnews
Speaker 2: dot Com. They did a roundup of you know, uh,
Speaker 2: liberals celebrating Rush Limbaugh's death, which really was just like, hey,
Speaker 2: if you want to harass some people, here's here's sudo harass.
Speaker 2: And I had people, I had people on my mentions
Speaker 2: on Twitter like saying things like, uh, you better pray
Speaker 2: you never meet me, Like people implying violent because I
Speaker 2: said I'm glad Rush Limbaugh is dead. I had somebody
Speaker 2: call my house and say, this, Rush Limbaugh contributed far
Speaker 2: more good to society than you ever will.
Speaker 1: Fine, God, my God.
Speaker 2: For Rush Limbaugh. This guy. But I mean, this guy
Speaker 2: had a show. He had a show. He wasn't a legislator.
Speaker 2: He wasn't he wasn't like some some sort of freedom fighter.
Speaker 2: This guy just had a show where he said mean things.
Speaker 1: Yeah, where where he repeatedly celebrated the deaths of his
Speaker 1: enemies and made half a billion dollars doing it. Yes, Okay,
Speaker 1: let's let's get into Russia's life. So the first thing
Speaker 1: I learned about him when I started digging him into him,
Speaker 1: that might be the thing I learned about him that
Speaker 1: surprised me the most. Rushi is not short for anything.
Speaker 1: Russia is a full a full first name, and in fact,
Speaker 1: Rush Limbaugh is the third Rush Limbaugh in his family line.
Speaker 1: They are very proud of that name. His grandpa, Rush
Speaker 1: Senior was born and raised in Bolinger County, Missouri, so
Speaker 1: he and I are both Missouri babies. He grew up
Speaker 1: into a world that was changing rapidly. Rush Senior saw
Speaker 1: an electric light for the first time when he was twelve.
Speaker 1: He took his first railroad trip in nineteen oh four.
Speaker 3: Real name, I thought that.
Speaker 1: I always thought that was one of those things I know.
Speaker 1: It was like I choose that. That is the most
Speaker 1: shocking thing about him. He rush Lama is not only
Speaker 1: his full name, it is the only name his family
Speaker 1: seems to give their firstborn sonsy a apro so, Rush
Speaker 1: Senior became a lawyer. He opened an office in Cape Girardou, Missouri,
Speaker 1: and he basically never left the town again. He retired
Speaker 1: in nineteen ninety four at the age of one hundred
Speaker 1: and two, which I mention because it suggests that all
Speaker 1: those cigars Rushmoke w r Us are Rush Limbaugh smoked
Speaker 1: saved us about thirty two years more of his show,
Speaker 1: Sweet I'm.
Speaker 2: Sorry, Did you say he retired at one hundred.
Speaker 1: And two in nineteen ninety four? Yeah?
Speaker 2: And then how long did he live after that?
Speaker 1: Did he get to So I think he died. I
Speaker 1: think he died immediately from what Yeah, Like he's one
Speaker 1: of those guys who worked until he died. Basically some
Speaker 1: people are. His greatest son was like that. So Rush
Speaker 1: Senior was elected to the Missouri House of Representatives when
Speaker 1: he was forty. His main political issue was fighting FDR
Speaker 1: in the New Deal, which shouldn't be surprising to anybody, right,
Speaker 1: this is deeply, deeply embedded in the Rush Limbaugh line.
Speaker 1: In nineteen thirty six, Rush Limbaugh Senior was a Republican
Speaker 1: delegate at the Republican National Convention, where he helped nominate
Speaker 1: Alf Landon for the noble job of losing to Franklin
Speaker 1: Delano Roosevelt in an election. You don't nobody was better
Speaker 1: at campaigning than FDR. It was never a successful thing
Speaker 1: to run against that family.
Speaker 2: I know, somebody had to be his Washington generals.
Speaker 1: Yeah, alf Landon, the Washington generals of Republican politics. So
Speaker 1: my main source for the early life and family history
Speaker 1: of Rush Limbaugh is a fairly comprehensive, if I would say,
Speaker 1: kind of fawning biography of Limbaugh by Zeve Chaffitz and Zev.
Speaker 1: It's a weird first name ze apostrophe. Ev chaffits. He
Speaker 1: notes that, over the course of decades of lawyering, Rush
Speaker 1: Senior quote quietly but inevitably became well to do, which
Speaker 1: is an interesting way of phrasing it. Just like there
Speaker 1: was no stopping it. He just got It was kind
Speaker 1: of a way of making it seem like he just
Speaker 1: he didn't really want to become rich. He just became rich.
Speaker 2: You know, that is the most suspicious sounding phrase.
Speaker 1: Long time, inevitably, quietly, in inevitably got rich. Sinister yea godah,
Speaker 1: it is very sinister. So Rush Junior, who is our
Speaker 1: Rush Limbaugh's father was born at some point. Quick googling
Speaker 1: obviously he had been born. Quick Googling didn't return a date.
Speaker 1: He's the only Rush Limbaugh without a Wikipedia page, which
Speaker 1: I guess kind of a kind of a shot to him.
Speaker 1: I could have probably found it out if I'd really
Speaker 1: dug into it. But it doesn't really matter that much
Speaker 1: for our purposes.
Speaker 2: Yeah, he did what he had to do. He gave
Speaker 2: us rush.
Speaker 1: He gave us our rush. Yes, our rush, our rush.
Speaker 1: So Rush Junior is only important for the impact that
Speaker 1: he had on our rush. He was a World War
Speaker 1: II combat pilot, which is undeniably rad You gotta give
Speaker 1: him that, and his biography notes that he maintained a
Speaker 1: military crew cut for his entire life. He was heavy
Speaker 1: set and top dad out at about three hundred pounds,
Speaker 1: which earned him the nickname Big Rush o.
Speaker 2: Big rush Man, one of those nicknames you you cannot
Speaker 2: combat like Big Rush. Sorry, Big Rush, Sorry, Big Rush.
Speaker 2: You can ask politely, It's not gonna happen.
Speaker 1: Why you in a big rush? Uh? So Big Rush
Speaker 1: became an attorney.
Speaker 2: Sorry, because I'm always rushing around.
Speaker 1: I'm always rushing around. So Big Rush became an attorney
Speaker 1: like his dad and his brother, who eventually went on
Speaker 1: to become a federal judge. Big Rush was a powerful
Speaker 1: orator and often gave speeches in the town of Cape
Speaker 1: Girardeau during holidays. His very conservative politics influenced these speeches,
Speaker 1: and his most famous one was a tearful hagiographic speech
Speaker 1: about our nation saintly founding fathers. Again, you can see
Speaker 1: he clearly had kind of the same gift of gab
Speaker 1: that our Rush has. And you have to admit if
Speaker 1: you want to, if you know anthing about our Rush
Speaker 1: Limbaugh he was an undeniably talented broadcaster. He was very
Speaker 1: good at what he did. That's why he had the
Speaker 1: impact that absolutely.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Now our Rush Limbaugh A Rush Hudson Limbaugh, the
Speaker 1: third to give his full name, was born in Cape Girardeau, Mississippi,
Speaker 1: on January or Missouri sorry, on January twelfth, nineteen fifty one.
Speaker 1: By all accounts, he had a financially comfortable upbringing with
Speaker 1: a brother and a parents who loved him. Baby Rush
Speaker 1: spent his childhood and bubing a steady diet of his
Speaker 1: dad's rants about scummy liberals and evil, conniving communists. One
Speaker 1: of Our Russia's childhood friends recalls a big Rush of
Speaker 1: his dad. Quote. We'd go over to his house sometimes
Speaker 1: just to watch him watch the six o'clock news. He'd
Speaker 1: sit in front of the television, drinking black cherry pop
Speaker 1: eat popcorn and just railing at the anchorman and the reporters.
Speaker 1: He'd yell at Dan Rather, they're all typical liberals, and
Speaker 1: Rather's the worst one of the bunch. And we'd try
Speaker 1: to keep him going. You know, mister Rush, what do
Speaker 1: you think about this? Mister Rush, what do you think
Speaker 1: about that? Sometimes he'd say kinder. That was this friend's name.
Speaker 1: You're gonna be the first Dutchman on the moon. I
Speaker 1: don't know exactly what he meant by that, but he
Speaker 1: was trying to be friendly. I liked him, but he
Speaker 1: was a harsh taskmaster with his sons. An odd comment,
Speaker 1: that's so weird.
Speaker 2: So Rush has a has a brother, or.
Speaker 1: Russia has a brother. He has a brother, David, who
Speaker 1: was his younger brother. No, no, no, I think that's
Speaker 1: the oldest. The oldest son is the Rush gets the
Speaker 1: Rush name.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they didn't do it George for me.
Speaker 1: Yeah, David becomes like a lawyer, doesn't really leave Cape
Speaker 1: Girardeau and is like, you know, he's he's he unlike
Speaker 1: his brother, has a family, has like a wife that
Speaker 1: he's you know, stays with and all that stuff.
Speaker 2: Did he quietly but inevitably become wealthy.
Speaker 1: I think yeah, I think he was bored wealthy. He
Speaker 1: and his brother were both born rich as hell. So
Speaker 1: and and our Russ's brother David provided an even more
Speaker 1: telling glimpse of kind of what their childhood was like
Speaker 1: under Big Rush. My dad stood out sometimes. He provoked
Speaker 1: people who didn't agree with him to violence. Once for example,
Speaker 1: he was in a bar slamming FDR and a couple
Speaker 1: guys jumped him and beat him up. I never did
Speaker 1: ask him the details of that one, but it was
Speaker 1: a couple guys. Not a fair fight, I know that much.
Speaker 1: I have to assume he deserved to get the shit
Speaker 1: kicked out of him. Yeah, I'm gonna guess he was
Speaker 1: saying something like, the people who got screwed over in
Speaker 1: the Great Depression deserve to starve to death. We should
Speaker 1: stay helping them. That's gonna be my guess. And he
Speaker 1: got the shit kicked out of him by some WPA guys,
Speaker 1: something like that.
Speaker 2: If your name is if your name is Big Rush
Speaker 2: and two guys go after you, I think that's a
Speaker 2: fair fight.
Speaker 1: That's a fair fight. You're big, you know.
Speaker 2: Yeah, he's a little Rush.
Speaker 1: He's three hundred pounds. They're probably each about a buck fifty.
Speaker 1: You know, their fight exactly, the fight by mass thin poor. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's so. Our Rush was born into the Eisenhower years,
Speaker 1: which will probably always be remember. It is like the
Speaker 1: high point of both capitalism and the United States. This
Speaker 1: period of peak American exceptionalism imprinted itself deeply on Russia's
Speaker 1: growing brain. His father was made a special ambassador to
Speaker 1: India's legal system. Their family got their first television. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: look because he was I think it means you know,
Speaker 1: India's was newly independent in the Eisenhower years. Right, They
Speaker 1: had just the UK had just left, they had just
Speaker 1: partitioned with Pakistan. They're developing their own independent legal system,
Speaker 1: and they're a democracy that was heavily based at least
Speaker 1: initially on the US. So the president like picked guys
Speaker 1: who were established lawyers, like Big Rush and also established
Speaker 1: Republicans to be kind of helped set up the Indian
Speaker 1: legal system. Wow, that's kind of what happened. So yeah,
Speaker 1: his father's a big man in Republican politics. Rush grows
Speaker 1: up seeing in the period where America is undeniably like
Speaker 1: like literally is half of the global economy. Right, that's
Speaker 1: a very significant thing for him. So the family in
Speaker 1: the fifties gets their first TV. But radio is still
Speaker 1: the dominant method of entertainment in those days, and Russia's
Speaker 1: childhood and early adolescence coincided with the birth of rock
Speaker 1: and roll and the absolute peak of cultural relevance for DJs.
Speaker 1: My dad grew up at a pretty similar period of time.
Speaker 1: He's like seven or eight years younger than Rush, and
Speaker 1: he grew up the only thing my dad ever wanted
Speaker 1: to be was a DJ, and he wasn't a radio
Speaker 1: DJ for like twenty thirty years.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 1: That was like the coolest thing that you could do.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 1: You didn't have Spotify, you didn't have the Internet. People
Speaker 1: learned about new music from DJs who were kind of
Speaker 1: like picking what they were going to play on the radio.
Speaker 1: It was like the absolute raddest thing you could be.
Speaker 1: And that's what Rush like. He idolizes these big DJs
Speaker 1: of the time, and that's all he wants to be
Speaker 1: for basically his entire young life is a DJ. Now,
Speaker 1: when Rush was three, Brown versus the Board of Education
Speaker 1: was ruled on by the Supreme Court, which led to
Speaker 1: the integration of US schools now Zeve Chaffits doesn't write
Speaker 1: anything specific in the biography about how Rush Senior talked
Speaker 1: about race to his son. I have not We don't
Speaker 1: get any of that information. And I'm not necessarily blaming
Speaker 1: Chaffits for that, because I think the Rush family is
Speaker 1: very pr savvy. They don't talk about it. You know,
Speaker 1: I don't know who he would have gotten that info
Speaker 1: from but our Rush would have definitely picked up on
Speaker 1: the great deal of conflict in Cape Girardeau over racial matters.
Speaker 1: Missouri is an odd state and that it is both
Speaker 1: Midwestern and southern. During the Civil War it was split
Speaker 1: between Yankee and Confederate sympathizers, and the town that Rush
Speaker 1: grew up in had monuments to the dead of both sides.
Speaker 1: There was tremendous resistance to the idea of integration of
Speaker 1: schools in Missouri and in Cape Girardeau, and Zeeve Chaffits
Speaker 1: to his credit rights about this quote. In nineteen fifty two,
Speaker 1: Cape built its white students a new school, Central High.
Speaker 1: Blacks continued to attend Cobb High School, but the supreme
Speaker 1: court and basketball changed that. Cape Giardu took its high
Speaker 1: school basketball very seriously and sometimes contended for the state title.
Speaker 1: The nineteen fifty three team was expected to be a powerhouse,
Speaker 1: but word got around that the kids from Cob were
Speaker 1: even better. An informal game was arranged between Central and
Speaker 1: Cob High, says historian Frank Nicol, Cob won. Shortly thereafter,
Speaker 1: Cob mysteriously burned down. Black students went to school and
Speaker 1: churches and private homes that year, But a more permanent
Speaker 1: solution was, yeah, they that's the kind of town he
Speaker 1: grows up and the black kids win at basketball and
Speaker 1: they burned their school down.
Speaker 2: Wow.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Cape Girodeau is a very racist town and kind
Speaker 1: of more to the point, like, we don't know exactly
Speaker 1: what Russia's dad would have said about any of this.
Speaker 1: We don't know that he would have supported the burning
Speaker 1: down of the black school. We don't know that he
Speaker 1: wouldn't though, that's right, and you know, the conservatives were
Speaker 1: definitely more on the don't integrate side of things right now.
Speaker 1: A compromise was eventually reached in Cape Girodo, and the
Speaker 1: compromise was that black kids would be allowed to attend
Speaker 1: Central High but they would be put in special classes
Speaker 1: that were taught by former teachers of cob the school
Speaker 1: that had been burned down. This was kind of integrating
Speaker 1: by not integrating. So there were black and white kids
Speaker 1: in the same school, but not in the same classes.
Speaker 1: And this is the way things were in Cape Gerarda
Speaker 1: when Rush Limbaugh started school. So yeah, that's you can
Speaker 1: infer from that what you will based on some of
Speaker 1: the things Rush Limbaugh says and does later in life.
Speaker 1: I think we're missing some important information about what his
Speaker 1: dad thought about black people.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I don't remember, if ever being concerned as to
Speaker 2: the investigation of that fire.
Speaker 1: I don't think he would burned down. He might have
Speaker 1: done it like that is rampant and irresponsible speculation in
Speaker 1: my part, but also, uh, the only reason I think
Speaker 1: he wouldn't have is that he wouldn't have been able
Speaker 1: to run away from it. In mind, from what I
Speaker 1: can tell, he didn't do well in that fight, is
Speaker 1: all I'm saying. So Rush had an upbringing that would
Speaker 1: have been fairly standard for a rich kid of his era.
Speaker 1: He played basketball, He did chore, He had plenty of friends.
Speaker 1: He was not an overly active kid. He did not
Speaker 1: like sports. He hated his one year in the Cub
Speaker 1: Scouts rushing them ball. Hates the outdoors his entire life.
Speaker 1: He did not like school. But he was popular, largely
Speaker 1: because his family was rich and had a huge basement
Speaker 1: with a pool table and a bunch of other luxuries.
Speaker 1: The kids Rush hung out with during this time give
Speaker 1: us some of our best hints about the darker elements
Speaker 1: of his childhood. One of them told Zev Chaffets quote,
Speaker 1: Russia's dad didn't suffer fools lightly. He was always very
Speaker 1: disapproving of Russia's ambitions to have a career in radio.
Speaker 1: Russia's mom was a kind, gentle person, but his dad
Speaker 1: could be pretty rough. He was not above calling down
Speaker 1: Russian David in front of their friends, and when he
Speaker 1: did it, there was a string of expletives attached. I
Speaker 1: saw that happen many times. So kind of abusive, not
Speaker 1: I don't think, by the standards of the time, And
Speaker 1: I haven't heard any that he was like fading his
Speaker 1: kids or anything, but kind of mentally abusive. Again, probably
Speaker 1: more or less in line with what most most men
Speaker 1: of his social class would have been like to their kids.
Speaker 1: You know, I don't think this was abnormal.
Speaker 2: I mean, how many how many of these guys were
Speaker 2: born out of the the the sort of ritual humiliation
Speaker 2: by their fathers in front of an audience.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think most of them.
Speaker 2: You know, It's like it's such a it's such a
Speaker 2: common thing that I guess I'm just glad my dad
Speaker 2: was a guy who didn't say anything.
Speaker 1: Ever, Yeah, it's better than humiliating you in front of
Speaker 1: your friends. When you say something he disagrees with. So
Speaker 1: every one of Russia's early friends that I've seen interviewed
Speaker 1: is very consistent about the fact that he was not
Speaker 1: political from an early age. He rarely, if ever talked politics,
Speaker 1: and he did not express strong beliefs. One of his
Speaker 1: friends even remembers him as a particularly good debater in
Speaker 1: school because quote he could argue either side of a
Speaker 1: proposition without missing a beat. When he did express political opinions,
Speaker 1: they were generally conservative. One friend noted that the only
Speaker 1: time he saw child Rush express a strong political sentiment
Speaker 1: was after the nineteen sixty presidential election when Rush was nine. Quote,
Speaker 1: Rush wrote on a drywall Kennedy Ie darn Nixon lost. Shucks.
Speaker 1: So grows up conservative because his dad is conservative. But
Speaker 1: it's clearly politics is not a big part of his
Speaker 1: life from an early age. He's not like Ben Shapiro, right,
Speaker 1: where from the get go he's being sort of like
Speaker 1: focused into becoming a political commentator. That does not happen
Speaker 1: with Rush Limbaugh.
Speaker 2: Right, He's more from the darn shucks school of the darn.
Speaker 1: Shucks school political commentary.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: So Rush got his first gig at age thirteen, working
Speaker 1: at a downtown barber shop. He later told his biographer
Speaker 1: that he liked the gig because it gave him a
Speaker 1: chance to talk to adults, who he preferred to his peers,
Speaker 1: because I didn't think kids were interesting. When it came
Speaker 1: to girls, Rush was as awkward as you'd expect. He
Speaker 1: was bad at sports, heavy set, and not at all smooth.
Speaker 1: In his nineteen ninety three biography, The Rush Limbaugh Story,
Speaker 1: biographer Paul Colford recalls one particularly embarrassing incident during a
Speaker 1: game of Spin the bottle when Rush was a teenager.
Speaker 1: He spun the bottle and it stopped at and it
Speaker 1: stopped pointing at the prettiest girl at the party, which
Speaker 1: is how she's described in this anecdote quote. She looked
Speaker 1: at him and gasped, couldn't do it, not with him,
Speaker 1: that is, And everyone in the room witnessed this humiliation.
Speaker 1: It was a wound he would nurse forever. Oh ah, yeah,
Speaker 1: that's nice.
Speaker 3: Uh, thank you biographer for that.
Speaker 1: And it's one of those things, you know, I think
Speaker 1: there's I'm sure this has an impact on the kind
Speaker 1: of man he becomes, but also I think most of
Speaker 1: us have a moment like that where we have a
Speaker 1: crush on some person of the opposite or the same sex,
Speaker 1: and they're not into us, and it's horribly embarrassing. It's
Speaker 1: a pretty and most of us don't grow up to
Speaker 1: destroy civil society in the environment. Right, Yeah, we've all
Speaker 1: been there, and Rush was there too. Obviously this is
Speaker 1: a part of what ever toxic stew gets cooked up
Speaker 1: at him. But I don't know, like it's one of
Speaker 1: those things I think you can kind of lean too
Speaker 1: much on. Oh, this is why he was always forever
Speaker 1: humiliated by this thing, and that's why he became the man.
Speaker 1: He was like, well, we all have that in our past,
Speaker 1: and we all don't do this shit.
Speaker 2: It's very much like the original origin story of Lex
Speaker 2: Luthor that uh yeah, Superman blew out his hair Superman.
Speaker 2: Superman was responsible for him going prematurely bald, and he
Speaker 2: became a super villain because of this. Y.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and you know there are a lot of other
Speaker 1: bald men in that world who don't become Superman. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So Big Rush wanted his son to become a lawyer
Speaker 1: or to do something else with a similar sort of gravitas. Right,
Speaker 1: The Limbaughs were big men in Cape Girardo. They were
Speaker 1: kind of like the the the primary, like the most
Speaker 1: prominent men in the entire town. And he Big Rush
Speaker 1: wanted his son to follow in his footsteps and do
Speaker 1: something respectable. Didn't have to be a lawyer, going to politics,
Speaker 1: do something important, right, something that he can brag about
Speaker 1: to the other rich guys. Now, the fact that young
Speaker 1: Rush only ever wanted to be on the radio infuriated
Speaker 1: his father. For his part, Rush seems to suspect that
Speaker 1: his love of radio was born in part from his
Speaker 1: hatred of school.
Speaker 2: Quote.
Speaker 1: My mother would be fixing me breakfast and I'd be
Speaker 1: listening to the guy on the radio. He'd be having fun,
Speaker 1: and I was preparing to go to prison.
Speaker 2: God, I mean join the club, Rush.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we all hate school.
Speaker 2: It's tradish everybody. It never occurred to me to related
Speaker 2: to the guy on the radio, like how come he
Speaker 2: gets to have fun, this full grown adult, and I
Speaker 2: have to go to school.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean there's a lot of kids. Let's I'll
Speaker 1: take my adopted hometown, Portland, for example, a lot of
Speaker 1: kids there who hate school. They don't destroy the entire planet.
Speaker 1: They just break Starbucks windows on the weekends, and that's
Speaker 1: much healthier.
Speaker 2: Rush.
Speaker 1: You can just buck up a Starbucks if you if
Speaker 1: you're nursing some rage at the educational industrial complex or whatever.
Speaker 1: So despite his irritation, Big Rush clearly did love his son,
Speaker 1: and when little Rush was sixteen, his dad used some
Speaker 1: of his local clout to get his son a part
Speaker 1: time job at the local radio station. Rush started doing
Speaker 1: what you'd today call internshit, you know, fetching coffee, cleaning up,
Speaker 1: handling odd tasks here and there, and eventually he was
Speaker 1: allowed to actually introduce and play records on air. The
Speaker 1: summer before his senior year of high school, Big Rush
Speaker 1: paid for his son to attend a six week radio
Speaker 1: engineering course in Dallas. This was a big moment for Rush.
Speaker 1: He was away from home for the first time, living
Speaker 1: in a boarding house. He started smoking cigarettes, thank god,
Speaker 1: and he got a license that allowed him to actually
Speaker 1: run the radio without adult supervision. Once he had this,
Speaker 1: station management let him hang out alone all weekend and
Speaker 1: weekdays after school, playing records and for the first time,
Speaker 1: presenting himself to an audience on air. So he gets started,
Speaker 1: and this is one of those things his dad clearly
Speaker 1: there are some abusive elements of their relationship. His dad
Speaker 1: is not supportive of Rush's radio career, but also is
Speaker 1: like his dad doesn't think it's a good idea, but
Speaker 1: also enables him right, like, not just gets him a job,
Speaker 1: but pays for him to get educated. So this is
Speaker 1: not a guy I'm sure you know he had his
Speaker 1: frustra strations with his father. This is not a guy
Speaker 1: who grows up with a dad who just doesn't get
Speaker 1: him and refuses to support him. This is a very
Speaker 1: supportive upbringing. This kid has his father's not yeah exactly.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: So Rush, you know, becomes kind of famous within his
Speaker 1: you know, the teen set at his town because he's
Speaker 1: the guy with the radio show and in high school
Speaker 1: and he was not at all political at this point.
Speaker 1: His most well known bit involved reading the daily beauty
Speaker 1: tips that the Associated Press sent out back then, which
Speaker 1: he like, and he would like kind of mock the
Speaker 1: beauty tips because he thought it was silly that the
Speaker 1: AP was sending out daily beauty tips, which is fair,
Speaker 1: it is that has a silly thing for the AP
Speaker 1: to do.
Speaker 5: Now.
Speaker 1: Russia's professional idol at this point was a guy named
Speaker 1: Larry lou Jack Lujack, a Chicago DJ who was famous
Speaker 1: for his sense of humor and comedic stylings. Rush leader
Speaker 1: called him the only person I ever copied. Lujack was
Speaker 1: known for audibly shuffling papers during his monologues and different bits,
Speaker 1: a tactic Limbaugh copied and used repeatedly through his decades
Speaker 1: on air, and as.
Speaker 2: In kind of like his signature bit no.
Speaker 1: No, no. It wasn't a bit, but it was like
Speaker 1: a thing he would do to emphasize that, like I've
Speaker 1: got evidence or I've got information here. You know, it
Speaker 1: was a thing Rush, and it was a big Rush
Speaker 1: Limbaugh thing. You know. It's it's how you convince people
Speaker 1: who maybe aren't that credible that you you have good information.
Speaker 2: Right, Yeah, he's been handed he's been handed to this
Speaker 2: ream of paper that has information on it. So it's true.
Speaker 2: But but Lujack was not a political guy, right he was.
Speaker 1: He was not, And he fucking hated Rush Limbaugh because
Speaker 1: when Rush got famous in the early nineties, Rush was like, yeah,
Speaker 1: Larry Lujack is the only man I ever copied. And
Speaker 1: they asked Lujack about it, and his response was basically,
Speaker 1: fuck that.
Speaker 2: Guy, bless you good man.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, you can't pick who finds you influentially, you know. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So back in those days again, being a radio DJ
Speaker 1: was pretty much the coolest thing you could do, and
Speaker 1: Russia's side job made him very popular at high school.
Speaker 1: He even signed autographs on a few occasions. The work
Speaker 1: was intoxicating, and Rush seemed to know at once that
Speaker 1: this was what he wanted to dedicate his life to doing. Obviously,
Speaker 1: his ambitions did not make his father happy, and during
Speaker 1: Russia's last year of childhood, his dad would constantly yell
Speaker 1: at him for wanting to waste his life on the radio.
Speaker 1: No amount of paternal ill will was enough to pull
Speaker 1: Rush Limbaugh away from his dream, though he was miserable
Speaker 1: at home and his father with his father, after graduating,
Speaker 1: he enrolled in a local college just to please the
Speaker 1: old man, but he couldn't actually bring himself to go
Speaker 1: to school very often. Sometimes his mother would drive him
Speaker 1: to college just to make sure that he went. Rush
Speaker 1: came of age during one of the most exciting and
Speaker 1: tumultuous periods in US history. I mean, he's literally becoming
Speaker 1: an adultho in like nineteen sixty eight. I think like
Speaker 1: some shit went down that year, you know, there's a
Speaker 1: lot of teenagers doing some exciting things. Now, given how
Speaker 1: Rush turned out, you might expect him to have been
Speaker 1: active and involved in the politics of his time. But
Speaker 1: he was not. And to hear him tell it now,
Speaker 1: or to hear him tell it when he related this
Speaker 1: to his biographer, the civil rights movement in the Vietnam
Speaker 1: years basically all passed him by. He never attended political rallies.
Speaker 1: He only dimly remembers hearing of Bobby Kennedy's death. When
Speaker 1: Martin Luther King Junior was assassinated, his radio station asked
Speaker 1: him to help send out news reports for the local
Speaker 1: NBC affiliate because there were uprisings all around the country,
Speaker 1: and Rush did this, but he didn't actually engage with
Speaker 1: the news. He was not actually interested in what was happening.
Speaker 1: He was just interested in kind of the business of
Speaker 1: how news was disseminated. Quote this is what he said later.
Speaker 1: I remember talking to them about the broadcast business NBC.
Speaker 1: I was seventeen, playing records on the radio, not commenting
Speaker 1: on news. I don't recall feeling any concern. So that
Speaker 1: is how we again a lot of privilege. There are
Speaker 1: massive race based uprisings in the number of US cities,
Speaker 1: hundreds of thousands of National Guard troops are called up.
Speaker 1: As after the civil rights leader is assassinated, the country
Speaker 1: is on the brink of open conflict in Russia, Limbache,
Speaker 1: I don't give a fuck, Like I just want to
Speaker 1: pla him a record. So you know, Wow, he's just
Speaker 1: a rich white kid, you know, in the middle of Missari.
Speaker 1: He doesn't give a shit.
Speaker 2: It's so wild to think about someone being alive at
Speaker 2: that time. Yeah, and not having a strong feeling either
Speaker 2: way about anything that's going on.
Speaker 1: Yeah, he's not doesn't even have strong hard right sympathies.
Speaker 1: He just doesn't give a fuck about it.
Speaker 2: Right. That is like a kind of privilege that I
Speaker 2: can't even begin to fathom.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and it is important that, like he's not just
Speaker 1: taking the right wing side of things, where like we
Speaker 1: have fu Martin Luther King, he was a comedy. He
Speaker 1: just doesn't care, Like none of this even makes it
Speaker 1: into his mind.
Speaker 2: Like the idea that you would say, Martin Luther King,
Speaker 2: who is that again?
Speaker 1: That which guy Bobby who got killed?
Speaker 2: Kidd of what dimly aware? That diminated?
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's it's quite a thing. So I'm going to
Speaker 1: quote now from a write up in The New York
Speaker 1: Times that ably summarizes Rush Limbaugh's early twenties. Quote. Love
Speaker 1: of radio eventually won out over formal education, and he
Speaker 1: dropped out of a local college after a year, appalling
Speaker 1: his parents. Then began a long, checkered odyssey typical of radio.
Speaker 1: Limbaugh held and lost jobs in several cities, working under
Speaker 1: different names and broadcast styles. He was Rusty Sharp and
Speaker 1: Jeff Christi. He was a DJ, a newsreader, a tak host.
Speaker 1: In each place he developed components of what would later
Speaker 1: emerge as the Limbaugh style. In Pittsburgh, he was a prankster,
Speaker 1: convincing listeners that he could see them through a new
Speaker 1: experimental picture phone. So he's kind of like a drivetime
Speaker 1: morning DJ, like yeah, we're gonna I don't know, I
Speaker 1: can't do the DJ voice, but like playing like soundbits
Speaker 1: and doing doing gags. Like he's very like not even
Speaker 1: really a shock jockey yet because he's not like that
Speaker 1: has that's like starting to evolve in this period of time. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I did find some audio from Run of Russia's very
Speaker 1: first broadcast in nineteen seventy four while he was still
Speaker 1: in Pittsburgh, and I think it's interesting because in it
Speaker 1: you can hear Rush in mid transition from that drive
Speaker 1: time DJ voice to the voice of the Rush Limbaugh
Speaker 1: who would help breed a modern American fascist movement. So
Speaker 1: here he is on wxz's Solid Rock and Gold Show.
Speaker 1: So without further ado, here is Rush Limbaugh in nineteen
Speaker 1: seventy four.
Speaker 6: Also appearing with SHAWNAA at opening the show. I'llby Billy
Speaker 6: Cook's Rainbows and Gypsies. See the exact name of Dolphin
Speaker 6: rated PG. Now showing at the Ardmore Drive in Bellevue,
Speaker 6: Bethley Senema, camp Horn Drive in Carnegie, set him A
Speaker 6: and Cinema World Nay of the Dolphin, also showing in
Speaker 6: the Hampton Plaza, McKay Cinema, OH Penn Hills Region and
Speaker 6: Ronji the leads ce Day of the Dolphin.
Speaker 5: Now at these the Wiggle South Hills, South Mark Drive In,
Speaker 5: South Hills Drive In and Sunset DEEO Drive In. I
Speaker 5: certainly hope you people are writing all this down. Don't
Speaker 5: miss a Day of the Dolphin. It is showing so.
Speaker 1: Very silly as all radio from the nineteen seventies sounds today, right,
Speaker 1: he has most radio today sounds but also like there's
Speaker 1: you would never have guessed based on his early performances
Speaker 1: that he was going to become what he became, right.
Speaker 2: No, I mean, look, he has undeniably great voice, great noise,
Speaker 2: very good at imparting information like actual factual information. This
Speaker 2: movie is for sure playing here at this time day
Speaker 2: if the Dolphins. Look, yeah, I can't wait to see it. Yeah,
Speaker 2: it's the exciting movie Day of the Dolphin. But that
Speaker 2: he's just straight reading things that you cannot misinterpret in
Speaker 2: any way, if only he'd stuck to that. But yeah,
Speaker 2: I it's so. I guess I don't want to get
Speaker 2: ahead of us and get ahead of ourselves. But the
Speaker 2: idea that this guy would not be content doing.
Speaker 1: Just this.
Speaker 2: Is like what when does it the idea that it
Speaker 2: turns like I don't know, I don't.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm sorry, we'll get to that.
Speaker 2: But I.
Speaker 1: Think it's fair to say this is what he loved,
Speaker 1: and he would have been perfectly happy if he could
Speaker 1: have made a good We're getting to kind of like
Speaker 1: a Hitler at art school story where like, yeah, maybe
Speaker 1: if he'd gotten to keep being a drivetime radio DJ,
Speaker 1: things would have been better.
Speaker 2: You know, I had I had a conversation with a
Speaker 2: friend of mine who who also does podcasts in radio,
Speaker 2: and for neither of us it is our thing, our
Speaker 2: first thing, but we shared a we we had a
Speaker 2: conversation where we shared our love of being good at
Speaker 2: reading copy like you have to do ads. There is
Speaker 2: something that's weirdly satisfying about like, oh, I sound like
Speaker 2: a guy on the radio. I'm doing a good job
Speaker 2: at reading this and making it sound natural and whatever,
Speaker 2: and it's like there it like there's isn't that enough?
Speaker 2: Isn't that enough? That there's there? It is a good
Speaker 2: feeling when you nail an ad read.
Speaker 1: Yeah, look, it's I mean, I think I think everyone
Speaker 1: who does a who who does a job that like,
Speaker 1: I think it pretty much everyone who has worked. There's
Speaker 1: a joy in professional competence of any time you know
Speaker 1: you're working, you know, if you're like if you're if
Speaker 1: you're running like the cash cashier at a grocery store,
Speaker 1: right when you get really good at bagging, like it's this, oh,
Speaker 1: the the the kind of ecstasy of competence right where
Speaker 1: you can kind of lose yourself in a task, you know,
Speaker 1: and be like I'm as good at this thing as
Speaker 1: I can be. Even if you don't like the job,
Speaker 1: there's a satisfaction in that. And I think Rush was
Speaker 1: happy in this period doing He wasn't rich, he wasn't influential,
Speaker 1: but he was doing a thing he loved well and
Speaker 1: he was happy in this in the in this period
Speaker 1: in the early seventies. So his early material in Pittsburgh
Speaker 1: is interesting to me because it's exactly the opposite of
Speaker 1: what you'd expect from him. One of his reoccurring bits
Speaker 1: was the Friar Shuck Radio Ministry of the Air, where
Speaker 1: he relentlessly mocked the radio preachers that he saw coming
Speaker 1: into the station on Sundays. He thought these guys were
Speaker 1: grifters and he hated them. The center of this bit
Speaker 1: was that no matter your problem, God would solve it
Speaker 1: if you'd send the radio preacher one hundred dollars. That's
Speaker 1: interesting to me, and this is like a real running
Speaker 1: theme in his early careers. He made fun of preachers
Speaker 1: all the time, of the exact kind of religious grifters
Speaker 1: that later helped make him a wealthy man. It's very
Speaker 1: interesting to me. Yeah, there's also he also would read
Speaker 1: letters from fans, and at one point he read a
Speaker 1: letter that he said was from a young woman who
Speaker 1: wanted to be a DJ and was worried that her
Speaker 1: gender would hold her back. Here's what he told her
Speaker 1: on the air. This is interesting to me too. You
Speaker 1: just have to master two techniques, and I'm going to
Speaker 1: explain them right now. Number one, the use of microphone.
Speaker 1: To use it, simply turn the microphone to the on
Speaker 1: position and talk into it. The second, which is the
Speaker 1: biggie is queuing up the record. Get the record you
Speaker 1: want to play, take it out of the appropriate shuck,
Speaker 1: slap it onto the turntable, take the arm and the needle,
Speaker 1: place it on the outside edge of the record. Then
Speaker 1: turn the record till hear the beginning of the record.
Speaker 1: Back it up a quarter of a turn, and when
Speaker 1: you get through talking, the record will start. After you
Speaker 1: have mastered those two techniques, girls change your sex and
Speaker 1: you can interpret that a couple of ways.
Speaker 3: That about the man explaining about how to turn on
Speaker 3: a microphone and then he goes, oh wait, you can't.
Speaker 1: Do it well that that. I think there's two ways
Speaker 1: to interpret this. One of them is what you've said, Sophie,
Speaker 1: that he was just being incredibly sexist. One of them
Speaker 1: is that he might he might have been acknowledging anyone
Speaker 1: could do this job, but you won't be able to
Speaker 1: as a woman because of sexism in the industry. And
Speaker 1: I'm really not sure which one he was going for there, yea, yeah,
Speaker 1: it could be both, Because it could be both.
Speaker 2: There is a kind of lording it over, like you know,
Speaker 2: this is a dumb job, but you're still not allowed
Speaker 2: to do it.
Speaker 1: You're still not allowed to do it ladies. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: that that's probably probably accurate. It's probably a bit of it.
Speaker 3: But Robert, you know what all ladies are allowed to do?
Speaker 2: Products?
Speaker 1: Is it at Sophie? Is it participate in capitalism as consumers?
Speaker 3: Yes, it is participating or capitalism.
Speaker 1: Ladies. Stick it to Rush Limbaugh by engaging positively with
Speaker 1: the system he spent his life propping.
Speaker 3: All right, shit, you know I didn't like the phrase
Speaker 3: stick it to Rush Limba very much.
Speaker 1: Neither did I, Sophie. Here's some mats. Oh we're back,
Speaker 1: we're back from those ads, and Paul, I can see
Speaker 1: the glow on your face that only comes upon a
Speaker 1: man's face the first time that he gets to help
Speaker 1: advertise the fine products and surfaces brought to us by
Speaker 1: the people at Raytheon. Are you feeling good, Paul about now?
Speaker 1: You are inextricably tied to wonderful products like the R
Speaker 1: nine X knife missile.
Speaker 2: I Yeah, as a boy growing up in Philadelphia, I
Speaker 2: dreamed of advertising for missiles.
Speaker 1: That's what everyone wants to do, right, Yeah, since cavemen
Speaker 1: painted on walls, they dreamed of Raytheon. And now we
Speaker 1: are in the privileged position of getting to sell their products.
Speaker 1: And I couldn't be happier.
Speaker 2: Here's what sucks. Raytheon is such a cool name.
Speaker 1: It is great.
Speaker 2: It's so good.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean this in this ongoing bit I do.
Speaker 1: I often just like the RNIX missile I think is
Speaker 1: made by Lockheed. Raytheon's guide it to be fair. It's
Speaker 1: just the name Raytheon is such a good shady defense industry.
Speaker 1: Like it's the name of a company that ends the world, right,
Speaker 1: Like you're talking about like like a you know they're
Speaker 1: going to make a sky net that kills us all
Speaker 1: at some point. Their name is just too on point
Speaker 1: to not be Yeah. So back to Limbaugh. Rush was
Speaker 1: popular in Pittsburgh and his bosses appreciated everything, but his
Speaker 1: long windedness. They repeatedly sent him memos that stated it
Speaker 1: shut up and play the records, and for a while
Speaker 1: he was content to mostly just do that. But in
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy four, the economy took a nose dive and
Speaker 1: Rush was fired. He had to move back home with
Speaker 1: his family, where he lived for seven miserable months. His
Speaker 1: dad repeatedly badge him to move on and start a
Speaker 1: real career, but Rush was committed to radio, and eventually
Speaker 1: he landed a new gig in Kansas City, where he
Speaker 1: started taking listener phone calls for the first time. This
Speaker 1: was the dawn of the era of insult comedy, a
Speaker 1: sort of mean spirited comedy based on pranks and you know,
Speaker 1: primarily executed by shock jocks guys The Body by Howard Stern.
Speaker 1: Really you entertained via ostentatious cruelty hungry as.
Speaker 2: I don't know, if I don't know, if you'll if
Speaker 2: you'll know, or not. Like talk radio, how much of
Speaker 2: a thing is it at this point of people calling
Speaker 2: in to radio stations to have conversations with broadcasters.
Speaker 1: It's starting at this point, right, This is really kind
Speaker 1: of the birth of talk radio, and Rush is on
Speaker 1: the ground floor of that.
Speaker 2: Right, does it start with sports or does it start
Speaker 2: with issues?
Speaker 1: I think it starts with issues. It starts with their
Speaker 1: Before what we know is talk radio. You had had
Speaker 1: people who would take calls and talk about politics, both
Speaker 1: on TV and on the radio. And one of the
Speaker 1: things that Rush changes to skip ahead a little bit
Speaker 1: is that those guys had mostly been interchangeable, right, They
Speaker 1: were just sort of fielding calls and engaging with with callers.
Speaker 1: Rush and that kind of turns into with these shock
Speaker 1: jocks more of kind of a comedy based entertainment. You
Speaker 1: have these pranks, you have insults, you have all this stuff.
Speaker 1: So it kind of it evolves out of a thing
Speaker 1: that had been going on for much longer.
Speaker 2: Right, It's an extension of the idea of the The
Speaker 2: original idea of the DJ was maybe a personality, but
Speaker 2: his main thrust was I'm giving you this music that
Speaker 2: you crave, and that's why you like me is because
Speaker 2: I'm gonna maybe get I'm gonna maybe get tracks before
Speaker 2: other people get them, and you're gonna hear You're gonna
Speaker 2: hear this stuff first. But there's still a thing of
Speaker 2: it's not about my personality necessarily it's mainly about I
Speaker 2: am the I'm I'm I'm, I'm the Santa Claus of music.
Speaker 2: I'm giving you these things, yes, and that's why you
Speaker 2: like me.
Speaker 1: Yes, And I have access to them first and all
Speaker 1: this stuff. Yeah. Right, so Rush kind of as this.
Speaker 1: He kind of sees the writing on the Walwaite. He
Speaker 1: loses his gig as a traditional DJ because that is
Speaker 1: starting to become less profitable, right, and there's, you know,
Speaker 1: in general, the economies taking a shitter. So he realizes
Speaker 1: that kind of the way things are going is more
Speaker 1: based around personalities and comedy and entertaining people, and he
Speaker 1: starts to pivot to that. So this is uh, there's
Speaker 1: a well an interesting quote that Rush himself wrote in
Speaker 1: one of his many interminable books about how he felt
Speaker 1: about kind of pivoting to insult comedy. Quote. I found
Speaker 1: out something about myself, something that was quite disturbing. I
Speaker 1: found out I was really really good at insulting people.
Speaker 1: For example, the topic one day was when you die,
Speaker 1: how do you want to go? I want to go
Speaker 1: the cheapest and most natural way I can. One nice
Speaker 1: lady caller from Independence, Missouri said My response was easy,
Speaker 1: have your husband throw you in a trash bag and
Speaker 1: then in the Missouri River with the rest of the garbage.
Speaker 1: When I went home after after a day of this,
Speaker 1: I didn't like myself.
Speaker 2: Is that being I don't know if that's being good
Speaker 2: at insulting people.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's not really, that's just.
Speaker 2: Being ready to insult people.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, it is.
Speaker 2: Though.
Speaker 1: One of the things people will state, and I can't
Speaker 1: categorically say this, but it seems accurate based on my
Speaker 1: recollections of the show is even when people would disagree
Speaker 1: with Rush on the air, he wasn't an asshole to them, Like,
Speaker 1: he was not cruel to his callers to their faces. Right,
Speaker 1: he would say cruel things about liberals, but when people
Speaker 1: would call in, he would not like call them monsters.
Speaker 1: He would not like He seems to have genuinely not
Speaker 1: liked insulting people to their faces or at least over
Speaker 1: like directly insulting people over over the phone or whatever.
Speaker 1: While he was disturbed by this, he was not disturbed
Speaker 1: by racism, mainly racism against black people. Yeah. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: here's where we're going. At one point during his call
Speaker 1: in show, he claimed he had a black collar, and
Speaker 1: he he claim to not be able to understand the
Speaker 1: man's accent. Limbaugh hung up on this black man after saying,
Speaker 1: take that bone out of your nose and call me back.
Speaker 1: Which is or I mean he says it was. We'll
Speaker 1: get to that. At another point, he asked his audience,
Speaker 1: have you ever noticed how all composite pictures of wanted
Speaker 1: criminals resemble Jesse Jackson? Now during a nineteen ninety interview
Speaker 1: after he had kind of risen to political prominence, Newsweek
Speaker 1: asked Limbaugh if he thought these statements had been racist.
Speaker 1: He replied, you may interpret it as that, but I know,
Speaker 1: honest to God, that's not how I intended it at all. Gee,
Speaker 1: don't get me in this one. I am the least
Speaker 1: racist host you'll ever find. Now, if we're going to
Speaker 1: try to analyze Rush from the length of his career,
Speaker 1: I think we can say two things. He's probably being
Speaker 1: honest when he said that he felt bad about insulting
Speaker 1: callers because he did not continue to do that. He
Speaker 1: is probably being dishonest when he says that he's not
Speaker 1: raised because he continued to say incredibly fucking racist things
Speaker 1: about black people consistently throughout his entire career.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, the the the number one indication that
Speaker 2: someone is racist when they say that the least racist
Speaker 2: has that ever been said by him by a non
Speaker 2: racist person, usually with yeah, it's always got to be,
Speaker 2: it's always got to be. Not only am I not racist,
Speaker 2: I am the least racist person you're ever gonna meet.
Speaker 2: It's like you don't maybe don't go that far because
Speaker 2: it's so so easily disproved.
Speaker 3: Also followed by the I don't see color people.
Speaker 1: I don't see color. I would say I think most
Speaker 1: of the people. I think I don't see color. People
Speaker 1: tend to be performative Obama voters. The I am the
Speaker 1: least racist person in the world. People tend to have
Speaker 1: strong opinions on why they should be able to say
Speaker 1: the N word exactly. Like that would be the split
Speaker 1: between the right and the left version it is yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: and both of you are fucking racist.
Speaker 3: So shut the.
Speaker 2: Fuck up, jimmy me, Robert right.
Speaker 1: Yes, yes, she's found out about our opinions on Liechtenstein,
Speaker 1: which I refused to apologize for. In the fucking Swedes,
Speaker 1: my god, the Swedes, Yeah.
Speaker 3: You do have issues with the Swedes.
Speaker 1: I have huge issue particularly blue Swede. What did you
Speaker 1: who get shakamine? Why did you say that at the
Speaker 1: start of that song? Okay? Sorry? Rush was Rush was still,
Speaker 1: at this point in his career, completely apolitical. His roommate
Speaker 1: and close friend at the time later told an interviewer
Speaker 1: he was scary smart about everything, but I can't recall
Speaker 1: us talking much about current events. He was funny, though
Speaker 1: I was an audience of one. Limbaugh's years in Kansas
Speaker 1: City were not super successful, and he seems to have
Speaker 1: recalled them somewhat sourly. As The New York Times summarized,
Speaker 1: Limbaugh likes to say, everything I did in Kansas City,
Speaker 1: I failed at He got fired from the station and
Speaker 1: quit radio forever to become an executive with the Kansas
Speaker 1: City Royals baseball team. Five years later, he quit the Royals,
Speaker 1: convinced his career there was steymiat and went back to radio,
Speaker 1: this time as a news commentator. Again, he got fired
Speaker 1: for being too controversial. Also in Kansas City, he married twice,
Speaker 1: both marriages eventually ending in divorce.
Speaker 2: What are the do we know? What the sources of
Speaker 2: the the what the type of controversies?
Speaker 1: Yes, we're about to get into that. Yeah, Okay, yeah,
Speaker 1: we're about to get in this. Sorry, come on. So
Speaker 1: it was in Kansas City where Rush Limbaugh, conservative commentator
Speaker 1: made his first public appearance after getting pushed out of
Speaker 1: the Royals. No one really liked him there. He had
Speaker 1: one friend who was on the team, and that's why
Speaker 1: he got to keep the job, and when that guy
Speaker 1: got traded, they pushed him out because they all hated him.
Speaker 1: So after getting pushed out of the Royals, he got
Speaker 1: a gig at KMBZ, a local station. He started satirizing
Speaker 1: what he considered to be a left wing caricature of
Speaker 1: of right wing political commentator. Right the initial right wing
Speaker 1: Rush Limbaugh was satire and he was being purposely controversial
Speaker 1: and reasonably extreme in order to make a comedic point.
Speaker 1: This was a joke. Initially this did not go over
Speaker 1: well with his middle of the road Mormon station manager,
Speaker 1: but it made Limbaugh popular with his audience. See Limpaugh
Speaker 1: had caught on to the fact that radio was in
Speaker 1: the middle of a revolution. This was the era where
Speaker 1: the first big shock jocks, men like Don Imus and
Speaker 1: Howard Stern, began their as sense to stardom. I found
Speaker 1: a wonderful write up about this era on Longreads, which
Speaker 1: argues that the first radio shock jock was a talk
Speaker 1: radio star named Joe Pine in the nineteen fifties, and
Speaker 1: I'm gonna quote from this now we might do an
Speaker 1: episode on Pine at some point. Quote His unconventional style,
Speaker 1: dressed up to dress down pinko's and women's libbers and
Speaker 1: riff on rather than read reports, was neither news nor entertainment,
Speaker 1: it seemed to be best described. While the New York
Speaker 1: Times and Time both did anyway as an electronic peep show,
Speaker 1: The personality free press of the time considered Walter Cronkite
Speaker 1: the most trusted man in America and Johnny Carson the funniest,
Speaker 1: but Pine, with a syndicated show on more than two
Speaker 1: hundred radio outle, was the most machiavellian when it comes
Speaker 1: to manipulating media icons of talk. Author Donna Halper told
Speaker 1: Smithsonian Magazine he was the father of them all. Pine
Speaker 1: briefly descended from his soapbox in the mid sixties for
Speaker 1: a week's vacation after bringing a gun to his show
Speaker 1: during the Watts Riots, suggesting the world wasn't quite ready
Speaker 1: for his kind of conservative appeal. So Pine is doing
Speaker 1: the Rush Limbaugh bit in the fifties and early sixties.
Speaker 1: But America is not ready for that yet. Right, even
Speaker 1: fifties America's like, this guy's racist and like and a
Speaker 1: fucking lunatic.
Speaker 2: Yeah. So, now, just so I understand Russia's this satire
Speaker 2: that he was doing. Yeah, the idea was, here is
Speaker 2: what left wing people think right wing people are like?
Speaker 2: And yeah, the point he is trying to make is
Speaker 2: they see us as they see the left wing sees
Speaker 2: the right wing as extreme and h hateful and you know,
Speaker 2: racist and closed minded. Like is that is that the
Speaker 2: point he was trying to make.
Speaker 1: I think so, because he's he even says like it
Speaker 1: was a satire, right, Like, That's how it's portrayed in
Speaker 1: his biography that he was kind of his personality was
Speaker 1: satiric in nature. And and that's kind of the only
Speaker 1: way I can interpret it is that he was trying
Speaker 1: to satirize what like kind of the looney right winger,
Speaker 1: you know.
Speaker 2: Okay, but through the through the lens of here's how
Speaker 2: the left sees them.
Speaker 1: I That's that was never said directly.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it sounds like it's a it's a a protective
Speaker 2: phrase of like I was not satirizing these guys directly.
Speaker 2: I was not satirizing right wing people. I was satirizing
Speaker 2: how left wing people see right wing. Yes, that is
Speaker 2: how I have interpreted what I've read. Yeah, okay, yeah
Speaker 2: that does sound like a base covering kind of thing.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it a bit. I do think he's started not
Speaker 1: believing everything he said. It started as a joke in
Speaker 1: him intentionally to provoke controversy, because controversy brings in listeners
Speaker 1: and gets attention, gets word of mouth. That's why he
Speaker 1: was doing it. And the story of Rush Limbaugh is
Speaker 1: these kind of purposefully absurdly extreme satire becomes what he
Speaker 1: really believes and is you know.
Speaker 2: Yes, so he's an a political guy who's like this
Speaker 2: is this is what this is what politics sounds like
Speaker 2: to me.
Speaker 1: I guess, yeah, I think so, and I yeah, that's
Speaker 1: how I interpreted. We'll go over that more so. Obviously,
Speaker 1: Pine kind of the first right wing radio shock jock,
Speaker 1: had peaked too early and kind of I guess, to
Speaker 1: steal a phrase from the Nazis, shown his power level
Speaker 1: to early during the Watts riots, and he got kicked
Speaker 1: off the air. Rush, though, started getting political at exactly
Speaker 1: the perfect time. This was the early nineteen eighties. Howard
Speaker 1: Stern came onto the scene in eighty four. Don Imus
Speaker 1: had risen to prominence in the nineteen seventies. Imus was
Speaker 1: another guy my dad listened to a lot growing up.
Speaker 1: Imus in the morning was like a big part of
Speaker 1: getting ready for school. Don Imus is going to be
Speaker 1: on the fucking TV.
Speaker 2: And you were like, this guy's having so much fun
Speaker 2: and I have to go to prison.
Speaker 1: I have to go to prison. This guy's having fun.
Speaker 1: He's talking about nappy headed hose, which was like the
Speaker 1: phrase that he I forget what it was in reference to,
Speaker 1: but like that's what got him in trouble.
Speaker 2: It was a women's basketball team.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it was a women's basketball team. Because don i'mis
Speaker 1: was also very racist. Sure, so yeah, the world was
Speaker 1: still not quite ready for the rush limball. We knew
Speaker 1: h during while he was like starting to be political
Speaker 1: at KMBZ, but a diet version of what he would
Speaker 1: become was now acceptable. And one man who recognized the
Speaker 1: potential of limbasch stick was Norm Woodruff, a consultant to
Speaker 1: the station who became the acting program director at Sacramento's
Speaker 1: KFBK network KFBK needed a new right wing talk radio
Speaker 1: host after firing their previous one, a guy you mentioned
Speaker 1: at the start of this episode named Morton Downey Junior.
Speaker 1: Morton was extremely popular and he was very extreme in
Speaker 1: his antics. This had allowed his local station in Sacramento
Speaker 1: to repeatedly draw national attention because he would say purposefully
Speaker 1: controversial things. This did backfire on Morton eventually, when he
Speaker 1: told a racist on air joke about a Chinaman, which
Speaker 1: was a thinly veiled attack on a local city councilman
Speaker 1: named Tom chin Downey Junior was fired and went into
Speaker 1: the world of television, where he would somehow simultaneously blaze
Speaker 1: a trail for both Tucker Carlson and Jerry Springer. We
Speaker 1: will do an episode on him someday because he's a
Speaker 1: very plential guy, absolutely, but his for today he matters
Speaker 1: because his firing number one his success proved that being
Speaker 1: a purposefully controversial right wing bigot was really profitable for
Speaker 1: radio station, and because when he got fired, Sacramento had
Speaker 1: a hole in the station's roster that they needed to
Speaker 1: fill with another racist right wing shitthead, just one who
Speaker 1: was not quite as racist as Morton Downey junior, rush
Speaker 1: Limbas stepped up and said, not being quite as racist
Speaker 1: as that guy is my middle name. For now, for now,
Speaker 1: Eventually I will be much worse. So Rush Limbaugh moved
Speaker 1: to Sacramento. When he started at the station, his new boss,
Speaker 1: Woodruff told him, we want controversy, but don't make it up.
Speaker 1: If you actually think something, if you actually believe it,
Speaker 1: you can tell people why. We'll back you up. But
Speaker 1: if you're going to say stuff just to make people mad,
Speaker 1: if all you want to do is rabble rouse, if
Speaker 1: all you want to do is of fend, then get noticed.
Speaker 1: That's not what we're interested in, and we won't back
Speaker 1: you up. He was clearly lying. I think this was
Speaker 1: ass covering by the station.
Speaker 2: Right, yeah, absolutely, yeah, but they would never would never
Speaker 2: ever push back on his bigotry.
Speaker 1: But you know who does push back on bigotry. Paul
Speaker 1: ads the products and services that support this podcast. So
Speaker 1: we're back. And at this point rush Limbaugh has launched
Speaker 1: himself as a right wing shock jock, and he is
Speaker 1: an instant hit zeev chaffits rights quote. The station let
Speaker 1: him go on the air solo, unencumbered by sidekicks or guests,
Speaker 1: and encouraged his highly personal right wing monologus. For the
Speaker 1: first time in his career, he was marketed heavily and aggressively.
Speaker 1: There were billboards around town showing a finger hitting a
Speaker 1: button captioned how would you like to punch Rush Limbaugh.
Speaker 1: Rush was so pleased by these that he sent Brian
Speaker 1: a snapshot. Morton Downey Junior had been a big star
Speaker 1: in Sacramento, with a five share of the market five
Speaker 1: percent of people listening to the radio in a given
Speaker 1: fifteen minute segment. Limbaugh tripled that he was sharp edged
Speaker 1: but good humored. The new morning host espouses many of
Speaker 1: the same beliefs of his predecessor, Morton Downey Junior, reported
Speaker 1: the Sacramento b but he skates a little further from
Speaker 1: the edge of the hole in the ice. Rush was
Speaker 1: rewarded for his success with a six figure salary, an
Speaker 1: estimable income in the mid nineteen eighties, even by his
Speaker 1: father's standards. More important, for the first time in his life,
Speaker 1: he really mattered. He was invited to deliver speeches just
Speaker 1: like Big Rush.
Speaker 2: He was an.
Speaker 1: Occasional commentator on television and wrote newspaper columns. Politicians and
Speaker 1: celebrities sought him out. He and Michelle, his wife at
Speaker 1: the time, bought a new house and furnished it with
Speaker 1: products he endorsed on air. So he's a hit.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 1: This is the start of and it's really just almost
Speaker 1: straight up from there for the rest of his career.
Speaker 1: He finds his niche and he runs with it.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Again, he's a very intelligent, talented man.
Speaker 3: Anybody else to find the big Rush part really funny?
Speaker 1: It is very funny. It's very funny. Now we're in
Speaker 1: It's still funny.
Speaker 2: Now.
Speaker 1: I have long argued that Sacramento is the very mouth
Speaker 1: of Hell itself, and the fact that Rush Limbaugh first
Speaker 1: saw success as a right wing firebrand there serves to
Speaker 1: support my hypothesis. Again. His conscious decision as an entertainer
Speaker 1: was to be a satirical version of a right wing polemicist,
Speaker 1: deliberately exaggerating the things he did believe for comedic effect.
Speaker 1: The audience thought he was funny, but I don't think
Speaker 1: they got the joke. And there is some evidence for
Speaker 1: this when an Ohio evangelist, a lot of evidence. Yeah, So,
Speaker 1: I think the earliest evidence for this, I should say,
Speaker 1: is when an Ohio evangelist very publicly claimed that the
Speaker 1: theme song from Mister Ed held a Satanic message when
Speaker 1: played backwards. You know, we're kind of talking about the
Speaker 1: Satanic Panic period during this. Rush found this ridiculous. And
Speaker 1: again he had a long history of mocking the evangelical
Speaker 1: religious right. So when he heard this, he told his
Speaker 1: listeners that a Slim Whitman recording also contained a backwards
Speaker 1: message of from Satan. Zeef Chaffitz writes that, to his delight,
Speaker 1: many Limbaugh listeners took Limbaugh at his word and flooded
Speaker 1: the station with phone calls promising to destroy their Slim
Speaker 1: Witman albums to keep the Devil out of the house.
Speaker 1: Rush considered this a hilarious plank prank. He did not
Speaker 1: apologize or as far as I know, correct the record.
Speaker 1: So we see in this he's joking, right, he is not. Again,
Speaker 1: his whole history is mocking these people. He does not
Speaker 1: believe this, but he doesn't correct people because it gets
Speaker 1: he realizes, Oh, they're engaged. They're destroying stuff. That means
Speaker 1: I have power, right. I think even found it kind
Speaker 1: of It might have been something that kind of addicted
Speaker 1: him to this, this idea that like I can make
Speaker 1: even if I'm deliberately being absurd and lying, I can
Speaker 1: make people take action based on those absurdities. That's got
Speaker 1: to be addictive, and I think it is for me.
Speaker 2: It is absolutely undeniable. And especially like if you spend
Speaker 2: time on Twitter, and if you've ever been like I
Speaker 2: have on occasion, deliberately stupid on Twitter and gotten sincere
Speaker 2: replies to something that is so obviously a joke, so
Speaker 2: obviously a joke, it absolutely is fun. There's no way
Speaker 2: around that. There's no way around that. Seeing people take
Speaker 2: you at your word when you say something that's so
Speaker 2: patently absurd is it's joyful. It does give you like
Speaker 2: a real jolt.
Speaker 1: And there's a This is a bit of a different case,
Speaker 1: but I think there's some similarity. So last summer, you know,
Speaker 1: I was covering a lot of the protests in Portland, Oregon,
Speaker 1: including doing a lot of live streaming, and very early
Speaker 1: on the police put a fence up around the police
Speaker 1: station and there would be marches where like a couple
Speaker 1: of thousand people would march to the fence and somebody
Speaker 1: would like touch the fence and the police would tear
Speaker 1: gas like six square blocks of traffic, And I started
Speaker 1: calling it the Sacred Fence, and the joke, like the
Speaker 1: comment that I was making is that the police are
Speaker 1: endangering the lives of thousands of citizens to protect a
Speaker 1: fence because it's sacred to them, right. That went viral
Speaker 1: within the city, and there were dozens of protests at
Speaker 1: the Sacred Fence, as everyone called it, including numerous attempts
Speaker 1: to tear it down. And I know that the way
Speaker 1: that I framed it had a significant impact on a
Speaker 1: lot of people getting hurt, damaging a fence, getting arrested,
Speaker 1: and it was both kind of intoxicating and it also
Speaker 1: scared the hell out of me. It was one of
Speaker 1: the reasons why I pulled back to some extent on
Speaker 1: some aspects of my coverage because I got really worried
Speaker 1: about the kind of impact that you can have on
Speaker 1: people by doing that sort of thing. I didn't want
Speaker 1: to be It was very concerning to me. But it
Speaker 1: was also I'd be lying if I said there wasn't
Speaker 1: an element of it that I wanted to do more
Speaker 1: stuff like that, and I didn't, but I wanted to,
Speaker 1: you know.
Speaker 2: But and that's that is the key, the key difference
Speaker 2: of uh, you know, you seeing something that catches catches
Speaker 2: fire in a forgive the phrasing, but catch fire in
Speaker 2: a in a charged situation, and how easily people can
Speaker 2: glom onto something when everything's so churned up, and then
Speaker 2: realizing like, oh, words have power, I have to be
Speaker 2: careful rather than words have power.
Speaker 1: Here we go, here we go, let's use it to
Speaker 1: sell gold. So Russia's domestic life while he's enduring all
Speaker 1: this professional success, his domestic life with his I think
Speaker 1: she was his second. I think she was his third wife.
Speaker 1: Actually I don't know. He had a couple. He had
Speaker 1: a lot of wives. I think actually, no, this was
Speaker 1: his second wife. His domestic wife life with his second
Speaker 1: life at this period was less than joyful. He was
Speaker 1: famous and popular, constantly feted for dinners and invited to
Speaker 1: big events, and his wife, Michelle was much less successful.
Speaker 1: She quit her job to be as assistant, but she
Speaker 1: hated the work. That it's a nightmare that gives me
Speaker 1: the Yeah. They were not a good fit. Michelle loved
Speaker 1: the outdoors, rush Limbaugh despised them. Two of his colleagues
Speaker 1: tell a story from around this time of how they
Speaker 1: convinced him to go rafting once that I think is
Speaker 1: telling about Rush Limbaugh's personality. So this is one of
Speaker 1: Russia's friends talking about at the time, they took Rush
Speaker 1: Limbaugh on a on a rafting trip in whatever river
Speaker 1: it is that goes through Sacramento. Quote, it's a very
Speaker 1: very mild ride. Bob gave Russian or and told him
Speaker 1: to Oh, you're gonna really love this.
Speaker 2: You have to know before I start the story, you
Speaker 2: have to.
Speaker 1: Know we're on a baby.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Bob gave Russian ar and told him to absorb the
Speaker 1: blow of the canyon wall to give us a little
Speaker 1: spring back into the current. Rush panicked, stuck the ore
Speaker 1: out his arm, stiff as a board, and upon impact
Speaker 1: he fell overboard. We got rushed back in the raft
Speaker 1: and the next day he spent the entire three hours
Speaker 1: of his show talking about his horrendous whitewater grapple with
Speaker 1: the Grim Reaper about a fucking baby. I've had people
Speaker 1: fucking shoot at me, and I've people showed me with artillery,
Speaker 1: and I've never spent three hours talking about it.
Speaker 2: Baby.
Speaker 1: So Sacramento is where Limbaugh started picking up what would
Speaker 1: become a voluminous list of mostly self inflicted nicknames. He
Speaker 1: was l Rushbo, the all knowing, all caring, all sensing
Speaker 1: Maha Rushi. He was also a harmless little fuzzball and
Speaker 1: the epitome of morality and virtue. He started claiming that
Speaker 1: his show was hosted by the eib OR Excellence in
Speaker 1: Broadcasting Network, which did not exist. This joke mainly served
Speaker 1: as a vehicle for Rush to express his grandiosity. He
Speaker 1: declared himself on the cutting edge edge of societal evolution,
Speaker 1: swore that he was serving humanity, and had himself introduced
Speaker 1: as having talent on loan from God. His opinions were
Speaker 1: quote documented to be almost always right ninety seven point
Speaker 1: nine percent of the time by the Sullivan Group, which
Speaker 1: also did not exist. And again he's joking. And also
Speaker 1: at a certain point he starts meaning all of this
Speaker 1: very literally, yes, right, Like that's kind of how narcissists were.
Speaker 1: So it may surprise people to know that Rush to
Speaker 1: hear that Rush Limba's career was launched into the stratus
Speaker 1: in Sacramento because California is, to most people outside of
Speaker 1: California at least, a bastion of liberal politics. Now you
Speaker 1: actually live and spend time in the state, you know, like,
Speaker 1: for example, if you've ever been to fucking I don't
Speaker 1: know what is that Orange County right or if you've
Speaker 1: been up near reading, there's a shitloak like there are
Speaker 1: more right wing Californians than there are right wingers than
Speaker 1: there are in like a number of US states. Right Like,
Speaker 1: California has a ton of right wingers and it has
Speaker 1: a long powerful conservative political tradition. California gave us Ronald Reagan.
Speaker 1: It gave US Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, who, in one of
Speaker 1: the most surreal turns in political history, is now among
Speaker 1: the only rational voices on the right in the United States.
Speaker 1: Yeah so, yeah, California has a powerful right wing and
Speaker 1: yes they are, especially in the last twenty something years,
Speaker 1: overwhelmed by the much more numerous liberals and leftists. But
Speaker 1: in this fact is one of the hints to Rush
Speaker 1: Limbaugh's rise. You see, Sacramento is located kind of north
Speaker 1: of the center of California, not far from some of
Speaker 1: the most productive farmland in the country. It is also
Speaker 1: not far from north central California places like Redding, which
Speaker 1: are right wing strongholds. The conservatives who live in these
Speaker 1: areas tend to be very extreme in their beliefs and
Speaker 1: that's partly a response to the liberal and left wing
Speaker 1: government that they live under. They see and this is
Speaker 1: not they are not entirely or even largely wrong in
Speaker 1: seeing this. They see themselves oppressed by many of the
Speaker 1: rules liberals in the cities put in terms of things
Speaker 1: like gas taxes, right, you're living in if you're a farmer,
Speaker 1: you know in central or northern California, a gas tax
Speaker 1: that is reasonable for people in La San Diego, San Francisco,
Speaker 1: Sacramento is a hardship on you, and you're not contributing
Speaker 1: to the kind of pollution in the cities that the
Speaker 1: gas taxes are meant to fight. You know, the strict
Speaker 1: gun laws and stuff. There's a lot of things reasons
Speaker 1: these people have to be angry, and Rush Limbaugh became
Speaker 1: their voice. So these this kind of infuriated very radical
Speaker 1: right wing who hates the liberals and left that govern
Speaker 1: California have a voice in Rush Limbaugh. He obliges their
Speaker 1: sensibilities with a ceaseless stream of attacks on liberal California.
Speaker 1: And that's what makes him huge is because there's millions
Speaker 1: of right wingers in California, and Rush Limbaugh becomes like, yeah,
Speaker 1: he's their voice. You know it, you could. You might
Speaker 1: even be able to argue that nowhere but California could
Speaker 1: have produced Rush Limbaugh as he became uh yeah, so
Speaker 1: I'm going to quote from the book Rush Limbaugh an
Speaker 1: Army of One here. He mocked the multicultural style of
Speaker 1: California by proposing to keep Ugglo Americans off the streets.
Speaker 1: Militant feminists became feminazis, The green movement was full of
Speaker 1: environmental wackos. The American left became commie pinko. Liberals and
Speaker 1: the residents of Rio Linda, California, were synonymous with stupidity.
Speaker 1: A ringing ded Ded Dedalate introduced news updates on what
Speaker 1: he regarded as the absurdities of liberal activism. Liberals, of course,
Speaker 1: hated him, which he found inspiring. When they attacked him
Speaker 1: as a dim wit, he responded by claiming that he
Speaker 1: was so much smarter than his critics that he could
Speaker 1: vanquish them with half my brain tied behind my back.
Speaker 1: Just to make it fair. Before long, Rush was too
Speaker 1: big to stay in Sacramento, which is again the very
Speaker 1: mouth of Hell itself. He was introduced to Ed McLaughlin,
Speaker 1: the former head of ABC Radio, who had started his
Speaker 1: own big radio company based out of New York City.
Speaker 1: McLaughlin had listened to Russ's show and decided it had
Speaker 1: the potential to go national. He offered Russia partnership, and
Speaker 1: after some haggling, Russia greed. He moved to New York
Speaker 1: and made the EIB network a reality. Rush was thirty
Speaker 1: seven years old at this point, in twenty one years
Speaker 1: into a career of doing almost nothing but broadcasting on
Speaker 1: the radio. Again, the voice of the so called populist
Speaker 1: American right. Never did anything but radio, really. In nineteen
Speaker 1: eighty eight, he launched a new version of the Rush
Speaker 1: Limbaugh Show, this time for an audience across the nation.
Speaker 1: It's sort of hard to find his stuff from the
Speaker 1: late nineteen eighties, but I found this guest appearance he
Speaker 1: did not long after in nineteen ninety one on another
Speaker 1: colleague show for the same network. It gives you an
Speaker 1: idea of where his radio personality was by this point,
Speaker 1: and of how he presented himself right, of how he
Speaker 1: kind of introduced himself anytime he was coming on the air.
Speaker 1: So that's that's we're going to play this now. This
Speaker 1: is kind of the birth of the Rush Limbaugh. We
Speaker 1: all know, we all.
Speaker 6: Know now one of radios and great broadcasters, and he'sa.
Speaker 2: With us today on the study. We invite a name
Speaker 2: Rush Limbaugh. That my ry, Hey thrill. It's about time,
Speaker 2: you know.
Speaker 4: I smoked a little dope to get ready for this
Speaker 4: in here, and I'm ready to go, man to one
Speaker 4: goal to time, one brain behind you back, Oh half
Speaker 4: my brain tied behind my back. Just to make it fair, Well,
Speaker 4: I'll tell you one thing, Yes, I use my talent
Speaker 4: on loan from god.
Speaker 2: Man. I heard you got a little loan from ABC.
Speaker 4: Can't say when you negotiating a new contract. Oh, I
Speaker 4: loan Limb some money, and I brought you a gift
Speaker 4: Los Angeles Times.
Speaker 2: Oh great, good.
Speaker 4: Wowed him there, didn't I that's nice having a big
Speaker 4: article on how you've flopped in the New York Times
Speaker 4: six minutes before nine o'clock.
Speaker 1: You started out with just like.
Speaker 4: A small group of stations on your shot with fifty
Speaker 4: six an hour of three hundred and thirty seven, with
Speaker 4: the weekly audience about six and a half million, an
Speaker 4: average quarter of our acuum of a million, seven most
Speaker 4: listened to radio talk show in America.
Speaker 1: That's that's Rush Limbaugh that kind of when he goes
Speaker 1: viral for the listin what do you think about that?
Speaker 1: About that how he presents himself on here? What does
Speaker 1: that say to you?
Speaker 2: It's so it's so the the fully formed version of
Speaker 2: him that I first experienced, and like he's really going
Speaker 2: for it, like he's really he's really like he's so
Speaker 2: aggressive in it, and and like saying I'm gonna come
Speaker 2: Like clearly the intention is, I'm gonna come on your
Speaker 2: show and I'm gonna take it over, and I'm gonna
Speaker 2: I'm gonna be the the the the I'm gonna be
Speaker 2: the alpha here. I'm gonna dominate you with this, the
Speaker 2: the La the present presentation of the La Times is
Speaker 2: because why that guy got fired from the La Times.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, like no, I think he'd been in
Speaker 1: Los Angeles and they savaged him in a review, right, Okay, Yeah.
Speaker 2: So it's it's you know, it's that Frankly, it's like
Speaker 2: it's all the ship that I hate.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, it is, it is.
Speaker 2: It's it's so it's it's aggressive, it's mean, it's you know,
Speaker 2: it's he's also correcting him on one of his you know,
Speaker 2: uh eight catch phrases. You know, you have to get
Speaker 2: it right. I say it like this every time. This
Speaker 2: is the way it goes. You know, it's just uh,
Speaker 2: it's a drag. It's a drag.
Speaker 1: It's it's a drag. It's also I think there's a
Speaker 1: thing that he's doing here when we talk about all
Speaker 1: these phrases, half my brain tied behind my back. Uh,
Speaker 1: you know, the uh from God, all these different phrases
Speaker 1: that were that he continuously for decades. I don't want
Speaker 1: to I don't know. I hope this doesn't seem a
Speaker 1: little pompous, but I kind of make a comparison between that,
Speaker 1: like the Iliot and the Odyssey, Right this like the
Speaker 1: way that anytime you've got home or introducing it's always
Speaker 1: like you know, the there's certain phrases. Anytime Achilles comes up,
Speaker 1: he uses the same kind of phrases, same couple of
Speaker 1: phrases to introduce him, These descriptive phrases to introduce a
Speaker 1: character that are repeated constantly throughout the because it's a
Speaker 1: because it was a spoken story, right Like that's where
Speaker 1: you're supposed to deliver it. That works. It gets in
Speaker 1: people's heads. They associate those phrases with those characters. Russia's
Speaker 1: kind of doing. This is an old tactic, but it works.
Speaker 1: It's the same thing Trump does with his impulse insults
Speaker 1: Crooked Hillary, right, sleepy Joe. These are effective tactics, and
Speaker 1: that's what Russia is doing to inculcate his followers, primarily
Speaker 1: with this idea that he is genius. Right, and again
Speaker 1: he's joking, but he's also not because this shit buries
Speaker 1: itself in your brains. He knows what he's doing. He's
Speaker 1: a very savvy per.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's like when you when you people like that
Speaker 2: that that understand the the importance of branding over having
Speaker 2: an actual thing to say, Like it honestly, the the
Speaker 2: what you what? The content is secondary to the presentation
Speaker 2: of here's who I am. I'm gonna tell you through repetition,
Speaker 2: this is my whole thing. It's like they're they're you know,
Speaker 2: comics that uh to me, it always makes me think
Speaker 2: of comedians that majored in marketing in college. Yeah, and
Speaker 2: then it's like, okay, but are they actually that funny
Speaker 2: or did they just are they able to really sell
Speaker 2: themselves so well that that the content is secondary to
Speaker 2: the image.
Speaker 1: You have two kinds of people who really are able
Speaker 1: to build a following. People who are able to build
Speaker 1: a following because folks genuinely just enjoy that the work
Speaker 1: that they're bringing into the world, they like their personality,
Speaker 1: they like what they're doing. And then you have folks
Speaker 1: who are able to build a following primarily because they
Speaker 1: do cult leadership. Right, Yeah, that's the that's what the
Speaker 1: marketing comedians, right, that's what this is. Cult leadership. It,
Speaker 1: this is how you do it. We do a little
Speaker 1: bit of that here, but we're all guilty a little
Speaker 1: We're all guilty a little bit, and I'll be guiltier
Speaker 1: when I get I don't know, a couple of hundred
Speaker 1: people killed by the FDA in my mountaintop compound, which
Speaker 1: I you know is always the goal. Paul, You're very
Speaker 1: welcome if you would like to have an armed standoff
Speaker 1: with the.
Speaker 2: You know you're successful.
Speaker 1: That's how you know you're successful when a three letter
Speaker 1: agency burns you down. By anyway, I don't need to
Speaker 1: Waco this time. I do love Waco. That's a good one.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I'm so improudb We took in almost an hour
Speaker 3: twenty for Robert to mention Waco.
Speaker 1: Good job. Yeah, I'm getting you know, I I realized
Speaker 1: I was wacoing a lot, trying to cut back, you know,
Speaker 1: get a little less.
Speaker 3: And then here he is first Waco.
Speaker 1: But well, we'll talk off air, Paul about synergizing our
Speaker 1: cults in the near future. Anyway, So Rush did not
Speaker 1: tone himself down at all after he went mainstream. In
Speaker 1: in fact, he grew more extreme, and he seems to
Speaker 1: have quickly forgotten that he was ever practicing satire. In
Speaker 1: nineteen ninety, at the very height of the AIDS crisis,
Speaker 1: Rush launched a new segment on his show, the AIDS Update.
Speaker 1: And I find it interesting how different sources report on this.
Speaker 1: When Limbaugh died, it was obviously a big story, the
Speaker 1: fact that he'd done this Aid's Update, and it was,
Speaker 1: in fact, Limbaugh Aid's Update was like the second or
Speaker 1: third most googled term alongside his name the day he died.
Speaker 1: Snopes and Newsweek both published prominent fact checks on this story.
Speaker 1: But ZEEV. Chaffits's biography of Limbaugh came out well before
Speaker 1: Rush's death and before the AIDS updates were really talked
Speaker 1: about all that much outside of the community they most
Speaker 1: impacted and not. I think it's interesting how Zev wrote
Speaker 1: about it, not knowing that this was one going, one
Speaker 1: day going to become a significant story. So this is
Speaker 1: how Zev wrote about the AIDS Update. After an act
Speaker 1: up demonstration at Saint Patrick's Cathedral in New York City
Speaker 1: that disrupted a mass Limbaugh chastised militant homosexuals for their
Speaker 1: disrespectful behavior, and shortly thereafter began broadcasting irreverent and tasteless
Speaker 1: AIDS Update segments produced introduced by Dion Warwick's I'll Never
Speaker 1: Love This Way Again in his traveling stage show The
Speaker 1: Excellence and Broadcasting Tour. He did a bit when he
Speaker 1: put a condom over the microphone to illustrate safe speech.
Speaker 1: So that's how the aid's Update was kind of framed
Speaker 1: by Zeve before it was a big story. Now here's
Speaker 1: how Snopes characterized it in their fact check after Limbaugh died.
Speaker 2: And I think before that, like already that doesn't sound
Speaker 2: good that.
Speaker 1: No, I don't think Zeeve is trying to whitewash. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think that he just doesn't see it as a
Speaker 1: big story.
Speaker 2: Yeah, even just plainly stated that is it's terrible.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's terrible, and it sounds worse when Snopes goes
Speaker 1: into more detail on this yeah quote. At the height
Speaker 1: of the HIV AIDS crisis, the Rush Limbaugh Show featured
Speaker 1: an AIDS update in which limbad joked about an epidemic
Speaker 1: that had claimed more than one hundred thousand lives between
Speaker 1: nineteen eighty one and nineteen ninety. Specifically, Limbaugh targeted gay
Speaker 1: men who had died. In addition to joking about their deaths,
Speaker 1: Limbaugh reportedly played songs during the segment include kiss Him Goodbye,
Speaker 1: I'll Never Love This Way Again, and looking for Love
Speaker 1: in All the Wrong Places. Snopes dot Com uncovered an
Speaker 1: interview in The Cedar Gazette from nineteen ninety in which
Speaker 1: Limbaugh said the segment was politically oriented and based upon
Speaker 1: my reaction to what I considered to be extremism in
Speaker 1: the political mainstream by a group of people. Per the
Speaker 1: Cedar Gazette, Limbaugh said his target is not AIDS victims,
Speaker 1: but militant homosexuals who blamed church and government officials for
Speaker 1: the epidemic. The AID'S update is meant to offend them,
Speaker 1: Limbas said, damn right. According to a nineteen ninety eight
Speaker 1: Los Angeles Times article, it was a popular segment, but
Speaker 1: it also created outrage among AIDS activists, something not helped
Speaker 1: by Limbaugh reportedly saying gays deserved their fate. Mocking the
Speaker 1: horrific deaths of gay people isn't something that will get
Speaker 1: a conservative radio host fired today. So obviously this was
Speaker 1: never more than a mile bump in limbaugh'squreer back in
Speaker 1: nineteen ninety. And it says a lot about where the
Speaker 1: right would go that a segment dedicated to mocking joyfully
Speaker 1: the deaths of people he disagreed with was popular right
Speaker 1: that would become the mainstream for Republicans. Now, in nineteen
Speaker 1: ninety it was still a thing he had to apologize for,
Speaker 1: and that year is the year he became officially famous.
Speaker 1: Nineteen ninety. He had his first live TV appearance on
Speaker 1: June second, when c SPAN did a special on talk radio.
Speaker 1: And yeah, so this is like he he does kind
Speaker 1: of have to sort of say that he regretted doing this,
Speaker 1: that he felt like he was kind of attacking people
Speaker 1: who like he was, like, I didn't mean to be
Speaker 1: mocking people who had died. I was trying to attack
Speaker 1: these militant activists, and so I stopped.
Speaker 2: Work so I fear that alive?
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, who are so far still alive for the moment? Yeah?
Speaker 2: Anyway?
Speaker 1: That So he does a TV appearance on c SPAN
Speaker 1: in nineteen ninety on June second, which is kind of
Speaker 1: his first big TV appearance, and then The New York
Speaker 1: Times does a big profile on him from that quote,
Speaker 1: with its characteristic attention to production values, the network simply
Speaker 1: set up a camera inside a spare WABC seventy seven
Speaker 1: studio in New York and let the self proclaimed most
Speaker 1: dangerous man in America a roll cut to a shlub
Speaker 1: and a cheap white dress shirt, black tie, and hastily
Speaker 1: barbershopped helmet of hair, already wiping sweat and grumbling about
Speaker 1: the TV lights planted behind his desk, and Mike interrupting
Speaker 1: the station's young newscaster, Kathleen Mahoney. She's trying to do
Speaker 1: her five minute top of the Hour update oddly for
Speaker 1: nineteen ninety while wearing a mask, because, as she explains,
Speaker 1: the host had warned her it could be dangerous to
Speaker 1: let his listeners identify her on TV as a liberal feminist.
Speaker 1: He was only joking. Limba insists, you said wear a
Speaker 1: bag over my head, Maloney says, Limbaugh keeps threatening to
Speaker 1: yank her mask off, complimenting her beauty, and interjecting impatiently.
Speaker 1: The news just holds up everything here. I'm trying to
Speaker 1: make the news worthwhile. There's a lot in there.
Speaker 2: Fuck Jesus Christ.
Speaker 1: That's a New York Times reportan of span appearance. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he's like both saying you should cover your face because
Speaker 1: my listeners will harass you for being a liberal feminist,
Speaker 1: and also take off that mask let everyone see your
Speaker 1: pretty face. Like he's simultaneously both threatening her and sexually
Speaker 1: harassing her.
Speaker 2: It's wild that It's good. It seems there's something about
Speaker 2: that that seems so modern. Do you know what I mean?
Speaker 1: Yes, yes, yeah, that could. He's because he broughtly created
Speaker 1: the modern right, you know, so you can see it,
Speaker 1: you know, in nineteen ninety that's what he's doing. Yeah, now,
Speaker 1: nineteen ninety is as I said. Also, when The Gray
Speaker 1: Lady published their first full feature dedicated to el Rushbo,
Speaker 1: the article is fascinating and valuable, since it seems like
Speaker 1: few copies of his early nineteen eighty eight to ninety
Speaker 1: one ninety two episodes exist. So this New York Times write,
Speaker 1: it provides us with several fascinating insights into how Russia's
Speaker 1: show evolved during this period, and, more to the point,
Speaker 1: into where American conservatism was about to follow in his wake.
Speaker 1: At one point, a critic calls in, this is again
Speaker 1: The New York Times are writing about his show from
Speaker 1: an episode we don't have anymore. So at one point
Speaker 1: in the show, a critic calls in and tells Rush quote,
Speaker 1: I believe you are doing a great disservice by using
Speaker 1: the program to convince people that if people are not successful,
Speaker 1: it is their fault. You were just a paid advocate
Speaker 1: of the rich and you despise the poor. Now that's
Speaker 1: very accurate. The author of the New York Times article
Speaker 1: notes that perhaps due to his guilt over his crueler
Speaker 1: shock jock days, Russia is very polite to his liberal callers,
Speaker 1: and this is what The New York Times writes as
Speaker 1: Russia's answer. You misunderstand my point. There is nothing wrong
Speaker 1: with being rich. It's not evil. Most rich people earned
Speaker 1: it by virtue of hard work. This has always been
Speaker 1: the country that people come to because there has always
Speaker 1: been a chance for opportunity. And if you start punishing
Speaker 1: the people who bust their tale to be prosperous, then
Speaker 1: you're going to unmotivate people to try that. I am
Speaker 1: not a paid defender of the rich. I am a
Speaker 1: proud promoter of the American way of life. Yeah, what
Speaker 1: are the.
Speaker 2: I guess that's a thing. You can just say that
Speaker 2: most rich people earned their money, Like.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's objectively untrue. But yes, you can say that
Speaker 1: objective untrue.
Speaker 2: But I guess if you are born to wealth, but
Speaker 2: then you also get a job that makes you even wealthy, yeah,
Speaker 2: that's hard work.
Speaker 1: I mean, look at Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates,
Speaker 1: all guys who were born to wealth. They weren't born
Speaker 1: crazy rich, they weren't born with fuck you money, but
Speaker 1: they were born into wealth and then they were able
Speaker 1: to get fuck you money because of the he And
Speaker 1: there's a lot written about that. You know, Bill Gates
Speaker 1: having access to a computer in an era when basically
Speaker 1: no one did. Bezos being able to secure a huge
Speaker 1: loan from his parents in order to help start his
Speaker 1: first business. Elon Musk also getting a loan from his
Speaker 1: dad to start a business. You know, it's the way
Speaker 1: it always works for these people, and they they spin
Speaker 1: that as self made, you.
Speaker 2: Know, yeah, because in their mind it's true.
Speaker 1: Because in their mind it's true, and they do work hard.
Speaker 1: And if you work hard, you can convince yourself that
Speaker 1: you've earned it, as opposed to like, I worked hard,
Speaker 1: but it only like I can say I worked hard,
Speaker 1: I can also say I am only financially successful because
Speaker 1: I got lucky. And I know other people who worked
Speaker 1: as hard as I did who have not been nearly
Speaker 1: as financially successful. And it's not because of a lack
Speaker 1: of talent. It's because I got a break that they didn't,
Speaker 1: you know.
Speaker 2: And leaving that, leaving that part out is how you
Speaker 2: were able to convince other people that that the majority
Speaker 2: of people are away, the majority of people are a
Speaker 2: wealthy through hard work.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's nonsense. So that New York Times piece reveals
Speaker 1: that by nineteen ninety, Rush was already popular enough to
Speaker 1: draw massive in person crowds, and this was unheard of
Speaker 1: for a talk radio personality. Today we're well acquainted with
Speaker 1: right wing thought leaders who can draw thousands upon thousands
Speaker 1: of fanatically loyal followers to in person gatherings. But Rush
Speaker 1: was really the first. From the Times quote, there are
Speaker 1: towns where he is unheard, unheard and unheard of. And
Speaker 1: then there are places like Tampa, where the announcement of
Speaker 1: a Rush Limbaugh stage show sold out the twenty two
Speaker 1: hundred seat Ruth Eckert Hall in four days. The occupants
Speaker 1: of those seats are out of them and cheering when
Speaker 1: Limbaugh appears in a three piece tuxedo. They're like the
Speaker 1: crowd for a country western concert, says Dan Woollet, the
Speaker 1: hall's director of operations, after sizing up the crowd in
Speaker 1: the law surprisingly youthful and more beer than wine drinkers.
Speaker 1: You're gonna have fun tonight, Limbaugh tells them. And at
Speaker 1: the same time, you're gonna learn some things. Pacing constantly,
Speaker 1: he does some jokes that poke fun at the Japanese
Speaker 1: and the liberal media. One of his jokes is that
Speaker 1: Judgment Day comes and the Washington Post article banner reads
Speaker 1: world ends tomorrow, Women, minorities hardest hit. It's like that's
Speaker 1: the you know, you see what he's going for there, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I see what he's going for sure.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Later in his live show, Russi engaged in a popular
Speaker 1: bit wherein he brings a piece of shit to a
Speaker 1: modern art gallery. And the joke is that, like, modern
Speaker 1: art is so dumb that if you like poop and
Speaker 1: take right, it's very obvious. This is it. You can
Speaker 1: find Ben Shapiro making the same basic joke decades later.
Speaker 1: And the gist of it is. That gist of it
Speaker 1: is that you know, liberals are so dumb they'll stare
Speaker 1: at shit if you tell him it's art. The Times
Speaker 1: introduces this bit and then moves on to something that
Speaker 1: I found chillingly relevant. Quote art criticism is a limbas staple.
Speaker 1: He believes there is a culture war going on between
Speaker 1: those upholding decent values conservatives and the kammie lib hordes
Speaker 1: trying to devalue human life and worst undermine private enterprise.
Speaker 1: Limba's sermon on art brings out the Evening's only heckling,
Speaker 1: a female cry of censorship. Oh no, Limbaugh protests, he
Speaker 1: never spoke that word, but seconds later he allows that
Speaker 1: censorship isn't really so bad. It has been used throughout
Speaker 1: this nation's history as a means of maintaining standards.
Speaker 2: Some means of maintaining standards. Yeah, what the fuck is
Speaker 2: he talking about?
Speaker 1: What he's talking about is threading the needle that the
Speaker 1: right is now the scent like right, the main I
Speaker 1: went I was in fucking I took a concealed handgun
Speaker 1: course in Texas because I'm getting my out of state
Speaker 1: permit so i can be armed in more parts of
Speaker 1: the United States. Because of all.
Speaker 2: That is like going to cooking school in Paris. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Well, and the things started with like a thirty minute
Speaker 1: lecture from the instructor on cancel culture, like this is
Speaker 1: the big thing within the right. I know, I know,
Speaker 1: I know, this is the big thing within the right now.
Speaker 1: And it Limbaugh is starting both like saying like, well,
Speaker 1: the liberals want to like censor us, want to cut
Speaker 1: out all ideas they disagree with, and then he moves
Speaker 1: on to saying but also, it's okay to censor people sometimes, right,
Speaker 1: because this is what the right believes. It's cancel culture
Speaker 1: if you if people don't like it and if they
Speaker 1: suffer financial consequences for being racist. But it's not cancel
Speaker 1: culture if they go out of their way to censor
Speaker 1: left wing in liberal voices, which they do through things
Speaker 1: like school books. Right, objectively true, well documented. This is
Speaker 1: how the right works.
Speaker 2: Absolutely.
Speaker 1: I know no one listening is going to disagree, but
Speaker 1: it's frustrating.
Speaker 2: But it is. It is absurd, the idea of of
Speaker 2: you know, like it's it's cancel culture. If you if
Speaker 2: you compare being conservative to being a jew in late
Speaker 2: nineteen thirties Berlin, to like it should be illegal to
Speaker 2: give the finger to the flag.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's amazing. And that, Paul is the end of
Speaker 1: part one of what is going to be like three
Speaker 1: hours of talking about Rush Limbaugh.
Speaker 3: Wow, way more time than he deserves.
Speaker 1: But how he had to do it. I mean, he
Speaker 1: deserves this much time, not in a good way, but
Speaker 1: in a we need to understand what this man has
Speaker 1: done to us all absolutely.
Speaker 2: And it's also if you're if you're willing to go
Speaker 2: to bat for Rush Limbaugh because you think it's mean
Speaker 2: that somebody is glad that he's dead. Let's lay it
Speaker 2: all out and here's here's why some people might might
Speaker 2: not be so sad that a human life is of evidence.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, yeah, evidence both that he deserves to have
Speaker 1: his death cheered and also that he loved laughing at
Speaker 1: people's deaths.
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah, in a way. Yeah, you are, you are.
Speaker 1: It's what he would have wanted. But you know what
Speaker 1: I want right now, Paul, I want you to plug
Speaker 1: your pluggables.
Speaker 2: Well, let's see. Uh. You can find me on social
Speaker 2: media at PF Tompkins on Twitter and Instagram.
Speaker 4: I have.
Speaker 2: A bunch of podcasts going on at any given time, Freedom,
Speaker 2: which I co host with Lauren Lapis of Scott Ackerman
Speaker 2: and Stay Off Homekins, which I co host with my wife.
Speaker 2: We started a podcast during the pandemic and unfortunately we
Speaker 2: are still doing it. Uh and I do UH. I
Speaker 2: do shows the first live streaming improv shows the first
Speaker 2: Monday of every month with my friend Lauren Lapus and that.
Speaker 2: All those tickets can be found at Paul F. Tompkins
Speaker 2: dot com slash live.
Speaker 1: Well, speaking of cancel culture, this episode is now over
Speaker 1: and thus canceled because of the libs it's done by Bye.
Speaker 3: Behind the Bars is a production of cool Zone Media.
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